NEW YORK — With its long steel wings poised sinuously above the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub has finally assumed its full astonishing form, more than a decade after it was conceived.
Its colossal presence may yet guarantee the hub a place in the pantheon of civic design in New York. But it can’t escape another, more ignominious distinction as one of the most expensive and most delayed train stations ever built.
The price tag is approaching $4 billion, almost twice the estimate when plans were unveiled in 2004. Even the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building the hub, conceded it would have made other choices had it known 10 years ago what it knows now.
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“We would not today prioritize spending $3.7 billion on the transit hub over other significant infrastructure needs,” Patrick J. Foye, its executive director, said in October.
The current, temporary trade center station serves an average of 46,000 commuters riding PATH trains to and from New Jersey every weekday, only 10,000 more than use the unassuming 33rd Street PATH terminal in Midtown Manhattan. By contrast, 208,000 Metro-North Railroad commuters stream through Grand Central Terminal daily.
The hub, or at least its winged “Oculus” pavilion, could turn out to be more of a high-priced mall than a transportation nexus, attracting more shoppers than commuters. The mall operator, Westfield Corp., promises in a promotional video that it will be “the most alluring retail landmark in the world.”
The hub has been a money-chewing project plagued by problems far beyond an exotic and expensive design by its exacting architect, Santiago Calatrava, according to an examination based on two dozen interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of documents. The soaring price tag has also been fueled by the demands of powerful politicians whose priorities outweighed worries about the bottom line as well as the Port Authority’s questionable management and oversight of private contractors.
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George E. Pataki, then the Republican governor of New York, was considering a run for president and knew his reputation would be burnished by a train terminal he said would claim a “rightful place among New York City’s most inspiring architectural icons.” He likened the transportation hub to Grand Central and promised it would be operating in 2009.
Michael R. Bloomberg, who was then mayor, demanded in 2008 that the memorial be completed by the attack’s 10-year anniversary. That meant part of the hub’s roof, which would be the decking under the memorial plaza, had to be built first, adding about $75 million to the budget.
At the same time, the Port Authority was often its own worst enemy. A 2005 construction contract was supposed to set a guaranteed maximum price, but to accelerate the work, several expensive subcontracts were approved. And in 2008, the authority rejected money-saving suggestions worth over $500 million.
Ultimately, though it may prove to be the building’s saving grace, the architect’s extravagant vision was inextricably linked to the problems.
Calatrava — known for lyrically expressive structures that are challenging and costly to build — insisted on column-free interiors, labor-intensive building methods, and sculptural and curvilinear steel elements manufactured abroad.
In 2002, the federal government set aside $4.55 billion for Lower Manhattan transportation projects, an irresistible pot of money to local officials.
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Planners envisioned an east-west underground pedestrian network radiating from two new aboveground landmarks: Fulton Center, opened in November and built by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the trade center hub.
“The hub is a project driven by institutional ambition, and once begun, the decisions that have made it so costly became irreversible,” said Lynne Sagalyn, director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia Business School.
The Port Authority authorized a $2 billion project in 2004, $1.7 billion of it from the Federal Transit Administration.
“The original schedules and budgets were unrealistic to begin with,” it conceded in a 2008 self-critique. “Had the rebuilding program gone without a hitch, those dates and costs could never have been met.”